


When Alec is no more

by A_French_Ship



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Eve, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:54:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28297086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_French_Ship/pseuds/A_French_Ship
Summary: Q hated Christmas since birth, or so he liked to tell others. Fairy lights, unchosen family and an excrutiating amount of time spent explaining to old uncles why he had not brought his girlfriend for dinner, nor why he would never. There was something about the cheer bliss that the holidays induced in common people that left Q feel consistently off.
Relationships: James Bond/Q, James Bond/Q/Alec Trevelyan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 48





	When Alec is no more

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer : Due to the current pandemic situation, I am locked in another country, unable to celebrate Christmas with the ones I love. And my lover shamelessly left me to spend the holidays with his fam. All in all, I'm not responsible for the amount of wine I might or might have not inhaled in the process of writing this ficlet. Enjoy :)

Q hated Christmas since birth, or so he liked to tell others. Fairy lights, unchosen family and an excrutiating amount of time spent explaining to old uncles why he had not brought his girlfriend for dinner, nor why he would never. There was something about the cheer bliss that the holidays induced in common people that left Q feel consistently off.

MI6 had been a comfortable excuse to avoid any type of celebration for quite a while. Years, even. It was not so much lying to his family but to say that some higher matters were keeping him at work and over time, his mother had stopped asking whether or not he would make it to Suffolk this year.

In fact Q had rediscovered Christmas when Alec had come into his and James's lives.

Certainly not before, during the brief affair he had maintained for a few months with James who was equally indifferent to the holiday season. Always somewhere else in the world, getting shot and shooting people in relataliation, James, Q had to admit, had sported the same strategy.

The first time they felt like they had to spend Christmas together, James and he, they had both found themselves frowning sarcastically at the idea, dismissing it as soon as one of them mentioned it (Q did not want to talk about it and would always say that James had uttered the idea the first, but the blond always hummed in reply, as if he did not believe him but would not say anything). Their first Christmas as some sort of couple, then, had been spent thousands of miles apart, one in MI6, the other somewhere in Yunnan.

With Alec joining their quirky couple, a few months later, Christmas had become much more of what Q imagined it was for common people. In spite of all the threat the Russian man represented on the field, he made their home extra sweet whenever December reared its head (which Q tended to think was quicker with each passing year). Alec would buy a tree and decorate it on his own, humming words in Russian that amused James more than Q, usually sitting in one corner of the sofa, his laptop on his knees, rolled in a blanket with one of his cats alongside him, deemed acceptable. He baked half-burnt ginger bread and sang silly songs, sometimes out of key. He would light fires in the fireplace, which was just a tad bit worrying to his lovers, and would experiment with hot beverages. They would argue the kitchen looked like a battlefield, Alec argued it looked Christmas-y. Many a December day, Q had snarled cynical comments at his Russian lover, and Alec had replied with unfaltering happiness. Always. It had to do with the fact that Alec had no memory of a family and that now that he shared his life with the two men he loved, he planned on making up for lost time. James had tried to talk it through to Q whenever he believed the younger of the trio was being a little too harsh, a little too insensitive.

Then Alec had disappeared in a mission, three years ago, eaten away by his demons. And now Q missed Christmas with him. Most of all, he missed him, but no time of the year was crueller than Christmas. What had seemed a comfortable tradition now looked devoid of meaning. They had tried, James and he, to pretend it was still Christmas, the first year. But the second year, half-traumatised still by the chaotic feelings they had undergone the first time, they had both tacitly agreed that they would spend the holiday season in MI6, working like nothing happened outside of the concrete prison they willingly sheltered themselves in. There was a stability in being alone, wrapped in the certainty of how things would go and of how things would not go.

This year again, they would spend Christmas at '6. Yet James was not on duty, since he was still recovering from a nasty fall that had left him with two broken ribs a couple of weeks before. Unwilling to let his lover on his own, he would stray in the buildings, taking his physiotherapy rather seriously (too seriously for Bond), dropping warm cups of tea on Q's desk, watching after him, checking the radiators of Q Branch and making sure his coat was dry by the time the young boffin had to ride the train home.

In spite of his healing ribs, James came to pick Q up in his car at the end of his shift. The evening had wrapped London in a dark coat, only lit here and there by Christmas lights. Their neighbourhood though, in the quiet outskirts of town, was not contaminated by the holiday frenzy that agitated any other district of London.

''I'll run you a bath,'' James decided as he parked the car in their garage and cut the engine. The automatic door slid down with a soothing hum, before it stopped and they found themselves in the dark. There was a pause and a sigh that left Q's lips.

He did not really know the cause of his sudden despondency. There was no real cause to his sadness since Alec was no more, or rather, everything was a cause of sadness, a continuous state of dejection that stretched ahead of him, sometimes leaving him feeling like an empty shell.

''I'll run you a bath,'' James repeated, with a tone that did not call for argument. Yet his timber was quiet, low but quiet, comprehensive. Q did not find him in such states. James's mourning took the shape of extreme anger, sometimes showing up in the field, when he killed an opponent with too much rage, firing more than necessary, preferring hand-to-hand combat to long-distance shooting, hurting himself in the process.

As they stepped into the house, Q felt his ears buzzing with suspicion. Somethign was wrong but he could not pinpoint it specifically. When he turned around to James, he realised the other man had already reached for the gun strapped to his belt. Everything was silent and dark in the corridor, yet the young man could not but hold his breath. There was a deafening moment of suspension as James stepped ahead of Q, forgetting about running him a bath and immediately getting back to his agent persona. He scanned the kitchen, switching the light on and pointing his gun at the direction of a potential assailant. Only half of the planet wanted Q's head on a stick and the other half probably wanted James's. But there was no one in their kitchen at that moment.

Q couldn't tell for how long he had been holding his breath, his hand firmly wrapped around the grip of his own gun. It would have been a mistake to think that the man who was designing 00-agents' weapons was not himself a good sniper. In fact, Q possessed half a dozen of more hurtful arms in his office – if only he could reach for them...

In spite of all his training though, Q still felt unsure about those sorts of circumstances. James, on the contrary, was in his element. Q could see him focusing on the softest sounds – the refrigerator humming as usual, the wind in the old ginkgo tree in their garden, so close to their windows, their own footsteps on the flooring. Q tried to be as attentive to all those clues as he had been trained to. Yet the initial unease they had felt while stepping into their house had not met any affirmative response. But one could not so easily tricked both his and James's instincts. And that person, whoever they were, would not get away with it. There was something in the strange commemoration of Alec's disappearance that made the both of them want to find the fucker responsible for their suspicion to be raised and kill him.

Time seemed to stop as they were looking for the source of their worries. It seemed never-ending yet Q could not remember exactly when they had stepped into their home in the first place. He who usually counted down everything, sometimes subconsciously, was now unable to process the confusing omens he received from the situation. There was soemthing off, but there was something familiar. And he could tell James found himself as torn as he was at that moment. After having spent years overwatching him in the field, he could tell when one of his agents was not feeling it.

''Hello, James,'' came a voice behind them. ''Hello, Q.''

And their whole world turned upside down.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please, make my day interesting, comment and kudo!!!  
> Stay safe!


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